How to Posture In Someone’s Guard and Deliver Strikes With Greg Jackson

Being in an opponent's guard is a tricky situation because they still have weapons when it comes to submissions from that position, however it does give you an opportunity to throw punches and elbows. Now the tricky part is to navigate being in your opponent's guard and still show the threat of strikes. You can't relax here and you can't' over commit with punches as you will get caught. Greg Jackson, prolific MMA head coach of Jackson's MMA, demonstrates a posture in the guard he calls the Walrus. Where he shows how to navigate being in someone's guard and still be safe and deliver your own punches and elbows. Greg Jackson says ground and pounding in full guard is a risk where they have all of these maneuvers and all of these things that they could do. You are taking a little more risk than other positions, you have to figure out if that risk is worth it, and mitigate that risk with this Walrus style. There are a lot of questions you have everytime you are in the opponent’s guard and ground and pound. 

How To Do The Walrus Posture

When you take the walrus anchor into consideration you want your eye line positioned with the opponent. Once we get our eyeline position we want to do some form of posture and that is what a walrus is if you really think about it. The walrus anchor is basically kind of a half posture so instead of posturing all the way up where you are completely vertical and back straight in the opponent's guard which is viable and that’s fine. 

A walrus means that you are driving your hips down and you’re going to get in on the opponent’s biceps and drive the hips forward and down and then bring your head up and be parallel to the opponent in guard as opposed to vertical. Notice the eyes being lined up with the opponent. The Walrus is great because as you are driving your hips down and forward you are now anchored pretty well and it’s going to be harder for them to bring their feet or knees in so you are nullifying their legs to an extent

Hand Fighting In The Walrus

Now you can get to the second part of the walrus style ground and pound which is hand fighting, you have to get around the hands. Now don’t complicate the hand fighting. You often see a lot of  pinning two hands on one because the opponent is always mobile, most of that stuff is not going to work. You can have a perfect hand pin and all these great things and then he just moves his head 15-20 degrees and you are going to miss. So the most important thing about hand fighting is getting on top. so you start with the biceps and you’re going to get to the walrus and all you’re trying to do is get your grip on top of their hand, once you’re on top of their hand if they try to break out of that hand for whatever reason as soon as they try it is very easy to deliver a strike like an elbow. 

Throwing The Strike And Being Safe

If you want to let go and strike that is fine as well but notice in the walrus that you are picking yourself up and again head movement is key you are going to drop your head down as you are striking so because of the hip position you are still tight and in control but you are coming up you’re going to hand fight basic hand fighting which means you’re on top however you want to ride it, you are on top and you want to drop as you strike and make sure you know the basics of ground and pound and the mechanics of how to throw a ground and pound elbow. But for now you get the takedown you get a good control position, you want to get rid of anything holding your head because that is preventing the walrus from walrusing so however you want to do that , lock the hands down and bring yourself up in the walrus position and then using your core drop the elbow down from either arm. 

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